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Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#111
post #102
post #93

A related question that I’ve been thinking about: What technologies/languages/tools/stacks can I learn now, that will still be relevant and useful in 2025, or 2030?

Something low-level. C/C++.

Good point! How about assembly (x86/Arm)? How about Rust?

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#112

Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…

I really enjoy Flask too.

I remember back when I updated my Build a SAAS App with Flask course[0] for Python 3.7.x when it was originally coded to support Python 2.7.x and 3.4.x, and it took like 15 minutes.

Also updating Flask to 1.1 from 0.9.x took around 2 hours but that also involved updating ~20 top level package dependencies at the same time, so most of it had nothing to do with Flask specifically. It was more about updating the whole app (which is a large SAAS app with payments, etc.).

I really like knowing that if I don't update my packages for ~3-6 months then the upgrade process will still be super painless.

A few weeks ago I also added Webpack into the app (and course) and even that, along with updating to Bootstrap v4 from v3 only took a little over 1 full day's of work, and that was starting from scratch and rewriting all of the CSS to SCSS and JS to ES6 JS. It's just so nice when your web framework gets out of your way and lets you use native tools whenever possible. It makes it SO much easier to follow that tool's documentation and online examples.

[0]: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#113

Sorry if offensive or presumptuous, I assume you are max. 30 years old? Being a freelancer the last 5 years (previously doing webdev part-time for 15 years) and having a couple of long-term side projects, I've been "burnt" enough that I've gotten tired of chasing shiny tech, just for it to become abandoned (e.g. bower, grunt, AngularJS) or introduce big breaking changes (e.g. some upgrade paths in PHP's Laravel or Sy…

What a condescending response.

Yes, this person is a student. No reason to act like this.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#114
I am really liking Quasar Framework for quick Vue development. It bundles a bunch of things that are annoying/confusing to new Vue devs (config hell) with a lot of niceties baked in by default: linting, hot reload, tree-shaking, etc. And it has a strong frontend UI on par with Vuetify and has good documentation.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#115
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I've been using Clojure for years now as my default language of choice. That was after several years of trying out various different "newfangled" languages like Scala, Golang, Haskell (ok, Haskell isn't very new), etc. I eventually landed on Clojure and it just clicked. I would like to pick up a Lisp that's not tied to the JVM for some things... perhaps I'll learn Common Lisp this year.

What are your arguments against the JVM if I might ask?

I don't hate the JVM, but there are certain applications where I'd like to have something that compiles to native code.

And of course, the fact that the current steward of Java and the JVM is Oracle makes me a bit uneasy.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Django and Bootstrap are my bread and butter too! I stick to them for anything mildly serious.

Same here; even throwaways get built on Django. It's just so quick and easy to test something out. And if you're lucky and it does need to scale… Django can scale just fine for the vast majority of things. It Just Works™ and the Django group is not trying to steer Django into something that it's not. Same with Flask.

Why Django over something like rails? If you going to go for batteries included go for a Tesla battery pack and not a set of double a Duracells.

I like using flask but django always felt half baked to me vs rails.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#119
I’m personally investing time to level up my proficiency with digital content creation tools — Houdini, Unreal Engine, Unity. They mostly only apply if you work in games or visual effects, but they’re a blast to play with even if your day job is in a completely different industry.

Re: Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?

#120
post #76

Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL. Not knowing of their capabilities may lead you to unnecessarily complicating your tech stack. You can go a really long way with just this domain of expertise. From there, do the same with whatever key-value store interests you (for me, it's Redis). Python isn't known for high performance but when a django web app uses a cache and relati…

> Learn how to really use a relational database, relational data modeling, and SQL.

I have to second this. There is so much power in relational databases that is untapped by most developers. The best part about this is that, for the most part, this type of knowledge can apply to multiple databases.

Some specific things that I want to gain a deeper understanding of are window functions[0] and recursive CTEs[1]. In particular, I've used window functions to identify peaks in sensor data (e.g., finding spikes in temperature, water level, etc), which would otherwise require iterating through rows and maintaining a bunch of state. I've never actually written a recursive CTE, but I'm pretty sure it would simplify virtually anything dealing with a hierarchy.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/tutorial-window.html

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/queries-with.html

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